The Living Daylights is based on concepts extracted from natural phenomena (most chosen, some imagined) that play with our perceptions of space, time and place, and rendered with improvisational frameworks constructed to enable many possibilities within the natural restraints of a conscious system.

These ideas were generated from my experiences exploring a range of natural environments over the last several years through my engagement with ecoacoustics and other research pursuits in immersive acoustic explorations across many different environments. These experiences are part of a broad interdisciplinary leap (on my part) as an attempt to find more passage between creative music practices and fields of acoustic ecology and ecoacoustics. I see these fields as intimately intertwined. There are a host of people and organizations building new canons and research areas such as the Deep Listening Institute, the EcoSono Institute, and other related movements and organizations. As my time in the field clocked more hours and locations – including many sites across Colorado and the great southwest, Alaska, Cape Cod, the Pacific southwest, Mexico, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Korea and more, I have become increasingly aware of the similarities between immersive activities surrounding intensive environmental participation, usually involving field recording scenarios and improvised music-making. The more one invests energy, time and intention to such immersive experiences in the world– the more phenomenal events occur – the world opens up to you. As in improvisation in theatre – the world says “yes.” Connections come alive, mysterious interactions occur.

These works, and the two incredible musicians whom I have been so honored to work with on this project reflect such phenomenological experiences. Scott Walton (acoustic bass) has been a key collaborator in my musical life, as equal a pianist as a bassist, he is a long-time colleague and simply one of the best musicians – as an inventive improviser, listener and performer – that I have had the privilege to learn from. Britt, to me, represents a younger, up and coming generation of insanely informed musicians. His skill as a drummer and knowledge as musician is well beyond his years. He possesses an uncanny ability to connect obscure subjects and histories within a deep understanding of the creative music world. The magic of his playing is his ability to wield musical and sonic information into its the fullest possible context. He’s also an “ex-student” of mine from UCCS – one of our very best.
An ensemble is an ecosystem with each member defining the community. In this “conscious system” individuals are free to roam and explore, while also being responsible for the whole – empathy is essential to create both meaning and form. Self-reflection between the rewards of individuality and seeking shared common good creates prime musical real estate. The thoughts and intentions of one person are internalized (and externalized) by the other members.

I view the wide world of sonic and musical languages in this work as idiomatic – a respectful departure of what is usually commonly understood in contexts of free improvisation as “non-idiomatic” (from Derek Bailey’s definition). To me, this is a resolvable contradiction. Our language is saturated within the idioms of our instrumental backgrounds – acquired ear, technical and historic knowledge along with both innate and environmental influences. How we wield our musical instruments is a fundamental part of our cultural “taskscapes,” a term used by Tim Ingold, originally “to bring the perspectives of archaeology and anthropology into unison” (The Temporality of the Landscape, 1993), “the constitutive tasks of the dwelling” that applies perfectly to instrumental and vocal play

Notes on the Tracks

The first three tracks make up a suite. They were the first pieces recorded on this project, conceived and recorded as one unit, and in one take. At Time’s Place is a play on words – we only ever really sense the presence. In this open-ended tradition of improvised music, the phenomenological act of real-time musical creation gives us a unique way to access the past and the future, simultaneously.

Zenosyne, from the unique “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” by John Greene pinpoints a fundamental experience that had no clear term (in English, anyway) – the sense that time keeps going faster. Such an example is at the very core of improvisational experience, and I like to imagine would be part of a future established aspect of music theory for improvisation. I am reminded of many times when an improvisation seemed to take ten minutes, and forty-five minutes had passed.

Apophenia, the perception of patterns, meanings, or connections where none exists, is also a relatively new word although the well explored phenomenon itself is not. Its first use is credited to the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad back in 1958 in his catchy-titled Die beginnende Schizophrenie: Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns, which translates to the equally scintillating The origins of schizophrenia: A Gestalt analysis of paranoia. It is fascinating that this word should appear to be so recent when the actual phenomenon is so old and important enough to have been a lynch-pin for philosophical study through the ages. In Natural History of Religion (1757), philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) wrote the following:

There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.

There is one major qualification and difference of how this idea is utilized in this work. This is a play on the imagination – the “random” discoveries that appear to have no connections, actually uncover true, previously unseen connections and relationships. I cannot think of a better context for the illusively connective experience of improvised music.

The Heliopause (with its syntactic musical resonance) is the boundary where the sun’s solar wind meets the faint radiation of interstellar space and is no longer strong enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures meet and balance – physics working on a grand scale. Imagine, even with this distance impossible for us to quantify in scale in our imagination, that this line is definitive and slender where the distant finger of our incubator solar cocoon touches the rest of the universe– what a musical thought.

42 degrees references the connection of people and light reflected in the observations of – rainbows. When we see a rainbow and its band of colors we are looking at light refracted and reflected from different raindrops at an angle of between 40 and 42 degrees at all points of view – whether one person is high on a hilltop and another hundreds of feet below. Light orients to our visual lenses, our lenses orient the angle of light.

Bow Shock, also called a detached shock or normal shock, is a curved, stationary shock wave that is found in a supersonic flow past a finite body. Shedding vortices (vortex shedding) is an oscillating flow that takes place when a fluid such as air or water flows past a bluff (as opposed to streamlined) body at certain velocities, depending on the size and shape of the body. Both of these phenomena, for me, connect with the wind “shock” that occurs inside and across a fast material with wind and brass sound production, and illuminate the use of creating sound vortexes in so many different ways in improvised music.

Involution Engine is a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, only applies to itself and is a function of its own inverse. for instance, in medicine, this applies to the shrinking of an organ (such as the uterus after pregnancy) or philosophy and psychology a “turning in” on one’s self. Musical phenomena in time also have similar phenomena but have been limited in concept, I believe, because of the hard-cast association with printed, scored notation – retrograde inversion, for example. The idea of a sonic involution works exquisitely in an aural, perceived identity, much like a physically created moveable object and is far more complex and four dimensional that can be adequately represented on a typical score (mostly).

I came up with Fissure Syndrome through pure free association upon listening to the results of this piece several times. As it turns out, it is a kind of an Apophenia in of itself, as this term lives in the medical world as, superior orbital fissure syndrome (also known as Rochen-Duvigneaud syndrome) is a collection of symptoms caused by compression of structures just anterior to the orbital apex.

For Pearl of Swirl, am fascinated by the perception of sound as physical moving substance or phenomena. To me, this conceptual mega-world is in its infancy and a signification of the music theory and creative methodologies of the future of music. Pearl of Swirl, here, references Pearl Swirl, a rheoscopic fluid created specifically to see the movement or currents in liquids. Its purpose is scientific in nature, yet, it carries commercial tendrils with trademark statuses and “secret ingredient” branding. It is at once a vital substance category for the science of fluid dynamics and other related fields in order to visualize currents, aerodynamics, turbulence, convection and other phenomena (a not so subtle nod to my father, an award winning physical oceanographer, fluid dynamicist and a very creative one, at that). On the other side of the coin, pearl swirl is also a novel commercial ingredient added to shampoos and other liquids for the purpose of a non-functional aesthetical “swirl” effect. This duality embodies the inescapable, almost satirical relationship between science and commerce in our culture today.